Lecture on Evaluation 9/19/2008

Professor Futrelle, CCIS, Northeastern University - Fall 2008

This is one of a series of occasional notes on my lectures.

Evaluation

Since evaluation is an important part of all your work in this course, I've gone through and picked out a number of brief items in your textbook that give insights into the evaluation process.

• Pg. 37, an assignment similar to yours


• Pg. 39, some of the cited references might be in our Snell Library. If you really want a book for your project that is not in our library, you can obtain it in two ways: If it is a nearby library you should be able to get a Consortium Card from our library which allows you to check out books from BU, MIT, etc. If that doesn't work, our interlibrary loan can get you virtually any book at all, as long as it's in *some* library in the country. It can take a while, so you have to ask early. Many journal articles are available in Snell in electronic form, for downloading.


• Pg. 54 discusses metaphors, which are often a part of various artifacts that you might be evaluating.


• Pgs. 61-62, discusses the confusing uses of the Trash icon.


• Pg. 94, a useful list of processes involved in cognition.


• Pg. 96, both views would be helped by alternating colors as on page 100, and as I've done in our class schedule.


• Pg. 115, Microsoft Windows in police cars to handle emergency situations? Didn't work for one city.


• Pg. 116, cognitive frameworks are listed, with details on following pages.


• When people interact with artifacts, e.g., an auto dashboard or a web page, the act. The elements of a theory of action are listed.


• Chapter 4 might have ideas that will help your evaluations; but there's no need to read it in detail yet.


• Pg. 426, evaluation is about how artifacts work for users. Users are discussed briefly in the list on pg. 426.


• Pgs. 443-444 has a good list of evaluation components for a specific example, a travel organizer.


• Pg. 475, confusion about requirements can lead to products that evaluate poorly.


• Pg. 481, try to think about or work with users who are not you. This can give you useful insights.


• Pgs. 505 and 509, be sure that you understand the differences between scenarios and personas.


• All of Chapter 12 is devoted to evaluation.


• Pg. 616, finding 57 usability problems in the final test/evaluation of a system shows how difficult these things can be.


• Pg. 646, the components of testing are all about evaluation.

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